Prompt: a cult of mathematicians doing combat with daemons from the platonic realm using their whiteboards, featured on artstation
(SimulacraBot [Stable Diffusion 768x768]) https://t.co/4jME1SY2UR
@MaxNighswander @Mathieu_Putz It was.
The specific fear was that the world wars would never end. I think we take it completely for granted what a strange occurrence it is that you can kill 73 million people between several nations and then a generation or two later they've become an economic alliance.
Capital is OP. x.com/MaxNighswander…
@peterrhague @MaxNighswander @Mathieu_Putz I think the fact that the first atomic bombs were only six times cheaper at destroying Japan than peak strategic bombing is an absolutely insane statistic to really think about. Gets totally overlooked in light of the massive yield bombs that come later, but woah.
@peterrhague @PrinceVogel @MaxNighswander @Mathieu_Putz I explore this and more in greaterwrong.com/posts/kFRn77Gk…
Today I release Simulacra Aesthetic Captions, a public domain dataset of 238,000 synthetic images, 40,000 user submitted prompts, and 176,000 aesthetic quality ratings. 🧵
github.com/JD-P/simulacra… https://t.co/juZKjgc57D
A system that cycles outputs into shared gen channels to solicit more ratings also doubled as community review, flagging unsuitable content for eventual removal from the dataset.
Data was collected from nearly 400 users using a Discord AI art bot. The bot was available in several AI art servers until it was eventually moved to its own private server to avoid swamping community servers with users who are only there for the bot. https://t.co/QYYaVwDbb8
An early version of SAC was used to create LAION-aesthetic. That version of SAC had only 4,000 or so ratings, leading the aesthetic model made with it to overfit. The new version has sufficient data to rival AVA, models trained on it seem more complete.
x.com/rom1504/status…
Unsuitable content included NSFW, hateful, and copyrighted content, as well as any content containing the personal information of the user or another non-public figure. https://t.co/pg5AaX0gCC
I anticipate many uses for the dataset, and am grateful to @RiversHaveWings for discovering the aesthetic models, @BoneAmputee's BATBot inspiring me to collect a prompt dataset as well as @longouyang et al's GPT-Instruct research for helping me to frame the design of SimulacraBot
It also contributes to the literature on human feedback driven AI alignment techniques in the vein of GPT-Instruct.
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
The overall approach of using synthetic data to get aesthetic feedback has several advantages over ordinary imagery. The royalty free nature of the dataset allows its free redistribution. It is collected over the distribution of images users want AI art models to generate.
During the COVID-19 pandemic we used up the last of the world's crucial supply of 90's nostalgia, leaving none for future generations.
@zetalyrae youtube.com/watch?v=IOX30C…
@PrinceVogel @rahulkindasucks gwern.net/Timing
@ESYudkowsky I hope you're not naive enough to think our multiverse is free of hell realms.
@mattparlmer Agricultural, but yes that's 2nd place
@mattparlmer The 20k years ago one, it is the real start of civilization after all.
@micahtredding I think the founders of religions think like you do, and then it's neutered by the necessity of social stability. Things regress to the mean, the radical founding principles become latent, noticed only by unusually perceptive people even when they're right in front of them.
@micahtredding This is in fact a general phenomenon for any social group with unusual ideas that have strong implications.
raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/129312114…
@meaning_enjoyer I find it very blackpill that deep learning lets us do the things we wanted from modernism (e.g. 12 tone serialism) but now that it's possible humanities scholars are just screaming instead of jumping on the opportunity to uncover the mysteries of beauty.
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
FDR is the only major 20th century dictator whose regime has lasted into the 21st century.
The greatest postrat cult lie is that greatness is untraumatized and personally flawless. Great people are as a rule fatally flawed, and their flaws are what typically kill them.
Alexander The Great died in a drinking contest.
To be both great and relatively flawless is a deeply exceptional state, exceptional on top of exceptional conduct that comes only from rare individuals worth particular study. A quiet and long term success should shout out to you more than a marching band
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
@pataguccigoon That one is apparently more ambiguous than I thought.
brode.co/blogs/main/173…
@quanticle Not a *20th century* dictator. 😉
(@RiversHaveWings) CLIP embed aesthetic models remain one of the greatest ML discoveries of 2021 to me. They imply that deep learning models like CLIP might provide a sufficient ontology to interrogate philosophical questions like the nature of beauty.
github.com/crowsonkb/simu…
Initial experiments performed with AVA had striking results:
x.com/RiversHaveWing…
Something like the twelve tone technique can be thought of as a manually specified prior, requiring great labor from the musician to execute. Deep learning can provide more natural priors with greatly eased execution, and we can reverse engineer them.
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
@JoeHendel @RiversHaveWings If you train a high dimensional enough statistical model its interpolations become novel/creative. It can begin to infer things that haven't been seen before. However it does do noticeably worse on things that are out of distribution, or not seen in the training set.
It's easy to think this, but given the state of the car market I suspect a lot of what's actually going on is that money is shifting away from production towards traders in 2nd hand goods. Capital doesn't decay overnight if you stop production, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. x.com/gbrl_dick/stat…
@baroquespiral Haven't done nearly enough historical research to say this for certain, but my gestalt impression is that the actual answer is that materialism is only popular among elites under specific and uncommon conditions, who for most of history were the only ones with leisure time.
@baroquespiral I'm always struck by how we literally think medieval artists couldn't draw photorealism when in reality their patrons just didn't want it. Many such cases, applies to many many things.
@baroquespiral What is interesting about the renaissance and enlightenment then is NOT that people gained the *ability* to draw photorealism, there are photorealist cave drawings. It is that suddenly elite preference was willing to sponsor it, or a niche for it opened up.
@baroquespiral If you want to know how that feels from the inside, our era is not very materialist and you can compare it to the early 20th century to get a sense of why:
extropian.net/notice/A3DxEED…
@baroquespiral I also recommend Lawrence Principe's Secrets of Alchemy for some idea of what historical material science study actually looked like.
amazon.com/Secrets-Alchem…
Reference class forecasting implies the coronavirus pandemic will last five years. x.com/outliersgeorg/…
What if the fall of man actually happened and we're all dying in our 70's because we've been infected with prehistoric HIV and don't even know it?
If body map is stored apriori in the p. nerve system we can infer at some point in development nerves in the genitalia and breasts have to decide if they map male or female features. This would explain how neural plasticity doesn't repair trans dysphoria.
statnews.com/2021/09/14/i-c…
Would also explain why amputation seems to help so much.
@algekalipso x.com/jd_pressman/st…
@baroquespiral I'm not sure it makes sense for the Western upper class to release a virus that doesn't selectively target their class enemies. Wouldn't a Chinese bioweapon (nation state rivalry/competition) make more sense as a motivation for this?
America literally got so painful to exist in that treating the pain caused lethal outcomes and we forced doctors to stop.
But the pain is still there, festering underneath the surface layer of society like an infected wound, one of many gangrenous pits in the American empire's flesh.
Prompt: Utility Fog: SciFi Concept illustration of a man wearing VR hacker goggles standing with his arms crossed in a sheen of turquoise fog, artists rendering, speculative science
(SimulacraBot [Stable Diffusion]) https://t.co/5JLBO8BZ98
@QiaochuYuan @softminus What do untraumatized people do with their day?
@Scholars_Stage The school shooting epidemic is functionally the bombing epidemic but with guns and a much more malicious vehicle of 'expression'. "These are insurgency numbers" as one person I saw put it.
@Ted_Underwood We can get there very soon if we want I think, we just need to start reverse engineering increasingly sophisticated probes of CLIP's aesthetic space.
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
Silhouette method works with DALL-E 2. x.com/waxreplica/sta…
This very much predates DALL-E 2, for anyone unfamiliar with it:
x.com/jd_pressman/st…
What I thought OpenAI was doing: Guiding the prior to increase aesthetics, content filter and "de-bias"
What OpenAI is actually doing: Tacking on "black" and "female" at random to prompts months after initial public access x.com/rzhang88/statu…
Premonitions of this are why your great grandparents put so much energy into delaying the inevitable.
Your first tip off should have been how much the CIA and sadistic psychiatrists loved it. t.co/gnM41rm2WX
@Evolving_Moloch My contrarian opinion is that it won't matter much in practice because moving slight net positive contributors (virtuous mediocre) into being slight net negative doesn't move the needle and psychedelic cultism is mere eclecticism that doesn't cooperate well with itself.
@Evolving_Moloch That doesn't make the suffering any less real for the people who get reeled in however.
If at least some:
Now that you're in the moment(s) you were imagining
looking back at yourself looking forward to/predicting this moment earlier
were you mostly right about how you in fact feel looking back at how you thought you'd feel?
How many of your emotionally salient memories can be described as you basically imagining in the moment how you'll feel about/reflect on the moment later?
Do you think this is a self fulfilling prophecy?
Concrete example:
You're 12 listening to a nostalgic song, "Take The Long Way Home" by Supertramp. This causes you to think about how you'll feel when you're older. This is a strong memory about being 12, you are now older and remember.
How do you feel?
youtube.com/watch?v=LPRrHy…
@ApplePieProphet @baroquespiral I think that's because fascism isn't based on ideas, it's not something that's easy to argue against in words. It's an aesthetic, a vibe, subconscious. Jordan Peterson hasn't been the same since the Benzo coma but I think he had a good handle on this:
youtube.com/watch?v=xTy1tU…
@ApplePieProphet @baroquespiral Trumpcore fascism in America benefits hugely from the top down imposition of Tumblr brutalism (pronouns, ideology in bio, LGBTQ+ acronym, etc) onto ordinary people who have reasonable aesthetic objections which fascists can pander to.
@ApplePieProphet @baroquespiral It's a brilliant strategy for them, because it's a hill their opponents are fully willing to die on. Contemporary political social media revolves around aesthetics, @wrathofgnon is pictures of relics and wheat fields with pithy quotes. I argue the wheat fields do most of the work
This is a really good, non-hysterical fact based writeup from @s_r_constantin that cuts through propaganda and weird misinfo by just looking at historical monkeypox outbreaks/studies:
sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/fine-monkeyp…
A milder version of this is what I actually believe. Most white collar jobs are fat, they *only exist to bind energy*, they are there as an energy reserve in case we suddenly need an educated labor force for something.
Most white collar workers are reservists. x.com/yashkaf/status…
This frame is much more sympathetic than "most jobs are BS", most jobs are nice-to-have reservist stuff that the economy could function without but pays for as a status, convenience, and latent strategic ability thing. It's not actually wise to let your human capital decay.
However maintaining it in this way is a recipe for frustration and boredom, because this kind of work can be valuable but that's not the same thing as it being meaningful. X-Risk focused narratives like climate change are also probably producing status anxiety in people.
@sashachapin I feel I can see character at a glance but am never allowed to comment on it. It really bothers me, everyone is hideously deformed and/or disabled but I have to pretend like they're not. Worse still I know I am too in ways I'm not seeing if everyone else isn't seeing theirs.
@sashachapin tbh a huge chunk of my desire for self improvement is driven by the ravenous paranoia this causes
@the_aiju You're a 99.9th percentile intelligent person complaining about not being 99.99th percentile, it's both your defining character trait and your most annoying one.
IF YOU LISTEN TO FOOLS
THE MOB RULLLLLES!
youtube.com/watch?v=AkvHFB…
Hilarious to think that because they're built to scam academics these AI plagiarism tools will eventually evolve into the first good artificial research assistants.
Thread myopically fails to recognize this. x.com/johnfsymons/st… https://t.co/lUXdfM00Fx
The happiness of OP contrasted against the negativity of the replies is a really powerful statement on where America is at in terms of economic dynamicism right now. x.com/MalwareTechBlo…
Crypto/etc should remind us that people like capitalism and we largely banned it with the securities act. If only rich people can get access to outsized returns from investment and profit from supporting each other in their endeavors it's not capitalism, but managerial feudalism.
@dylanhendricks Just because you're on a sigmoid curve doesn't mean you should stop before you reach the top.
Relevant essay:
blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/228662408…
This is a good prompt to understand what Nick Land means by capitalist exogamy. The risk adjusted standard return is a byproduct of rational management, nearly by definition 'outsized returns' are those which come from the process of bringing untamed forces into the system. x.com/dylanhendricks…
It's one of the fundamental forces underlying why VC firms seem to do no better than chance, venture capital is trying to sift through adversarial examples to the existing economic system to exploit for financial gain.
When it becomes a norm that you pay attention to people who speak in difficult language and ignore people who speak honestly and easily you are on the road to decadence.
Whitepill: This ailing strip mall we shopped at when I was a kid died in the 2008 financial crash. In 2016 it was bought, torn down, and redeveloped as a mixed-use zoning commerce-housing complex.
I know it feels like you're screaming into the void, but the world can change. https://t.co/SEjLRqDydw
thesledgehammer.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/ret…
Any org or role that exists to "minimize harm" is a trolley problem maximizer.
@mattparlmer tbh the thing that made me go "Yeah I want to support Yang" was when I saw him tweet that we need to pay Congress more. That was my unignorable signal this guy was ready to think sanely even when it was deeply unpopular.
@mattparlmer x.com/jd_pressman/st…
@mattparlmer x.com/jd_pressman/st…
Want your own Twitter archive? Modify this script.
Twitter Archive by John David Pressman is marked with CC0 1.0